Days 9 through 12 (sorry!)

Okay, in my own defense, my computer has been spazzing out for a while. Getting it to work long enough to get this posted was an epic battle.

Tammany (continued):

There was an uncomfortable silence until we got back with everyone's drinks, at which point Cale started talking with Grace as if nothing had happened. I found myself getting well and truly pissed with this Morgan person. Whatever she'd done that made Cale this edgy and uncomfortable so long after it happened must have been awful. I slipped over to her once we'd distributed beverages. She smiled at me, the awkward smile that says, 'you're in the same group of concert-goers as I am, but I honestly wouldn't know you from Eve, so I'm just going to smile and hope you go away.' And she made it seem elegant. Bitch.

I smiled back to her, and said, sweetly as I could, "I don't know what you did to Cale, but if I ever find out, and if you ever do it again, or hurt him in any way, I will murder you and turn you into sandwich fillings. Okay?"

She stared at me, the irritatingly sunny expression gone from her face, replaced by a frown. But before she could respond, I said, "No," and walked back around to join Andrew and Cale. I felt better.

The band was due to come on at any minute. They were an as-yet unsigned group, hence why Andrew had brought Nathan along. I'd seen them once or twice, and they were good, but only in parts. The kayboardist and drummer were merely mediocre, but the lead singer and guitarist, Rhiannon Shay, was possibly my favorite of all the musicians to frequent the Oyster. She could sing down the moon, if so she wanted. She was absolutely amazing. I intended to point her out to Andrew at the first available moment. Of course, it turned out that I didn't have to,  because as the band filtered onto the stage, he leaned over to me and asked, "Who's that chick?" I told him. "I like her," he said, decisively. "She's the only one who seems to have a clue what she's doing."

And she was - she was helping with the last minute adjustments with the other two, as well as getting her guitar ready. Then she turned to the audience, and we all fell under her spell. Her stage presence was magical. Twenty songs later, she released us all by announcing the set break, and I turned to look at Andrew. He was still staring at the stage. Grace, who was on his other side, leaned around him and stage-whispered to me, "He's in a music coma. We should probably shake him."

"No, I'm good," he said, shaking himself awake. Then he mentally disappeared again for a moment, before returning to announce, "I need her." He grabbed Nathan and marched off.

"Does he have a plan to get backstage without getting in absolutely huge amounts of trouble?' I asked his sister.

"Oh, he usually manages," she said, with a wave of her hand. "I've only known him to get thrown out of a place once, and that was because we were in Portland over the summer and he chose the wrong room to march into. It was the employee break room, not the backstage area."

"That must have been embarrassing," Cale said, (sort of) interacting with me for the first time in an hour.

"Well, he still signed the person he wanted to sign, so it wasn't a complete loss," Grace said, smiling at him. Then she turned away and started talking with Jim, who'd been her companion all night.

That's when Cale grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the crowd, the performance hall, and even the building. "God, Cale, wait, do we have our ticket stubs?" I asked, leaning back against his tug.

"Yeah, yeah, I got them," he said, continuing forward. "Look, you're the one who wanted to find out what happened with Morgan, alright?"

I followed without complaint.

When we were out on the street, leaning against the cool brick wall in the smoky night air, I looked at him expectantly. He took a deep breath, and said, "You remember your senior year of college, when I was a new graduate trying to figure out how to not become an accountant when my degree was in business and math?"

"Yeah," I said, nodding. "Bright idea, that major, by the way."

He rolled his eyes. "Anyway, you remember how intense I was about music back then. Way more than I am now. I was doing auditions, sending out tapes, all that crap, just trying to get a response, seeing if I could make it that way rather than doing the books for places and working fast food."

"You complained all the freaking time," I said, shaking my head at the memory. "No sympathy for my senior project."

"Hey, real life is hard," he said, turning his face up towards the streetlight overhead. "You didn't get that yet. But the thing was, with all those tapes going out and stuff, I was getting responses. People were interested. Even our very own local Music Inc. asked me to come in a do a demo."

I stared at him accusingly. "You never told me that!"

"I didn't want to get both our hopes up," he said, apologetically. "If I got turned down, you'd have gone mama bear and torn someone a new one and I'd have been embarrassed. But I did the audition - and I met Morgan. She was just a secretary there, with a brand spanking new degree in the exact same stuff I had a degree in, unsatisfied with her job, looking for something or someone to keep her mind off the fact that she was basically a data entry clerk and coffee-getter. I ended up becoming that someone."

"Was this when I was on that trip to Chile for a quarter?" I asked. "Because if you'd gotten yourself a girl that looked like that, and I was around, I would never have heard the end of it. Ever."